Reliquary chasse of St. Thomas Becket

“This enamel reliquary—originally containing a fragment of the body of Saint Thomas Becket and portraying the popular scene of his martyrdom—was created to participate in sacred ritual. Reliquaries were often displayed on the altars of medieval churches to focus the meditations of pilgrims, who journeyed from church to church to claim the power of Christian saints through proximity to their physical remains. Evidence suggests that in church services, priests might actually have picked up and displayed reliquaries to draw the attention of their congregation, and we also know that they were carried in procession on special feast days or in times of special need. They were hardly the stable objects we see protected in museum cases today. They were props for ritual performance, and as they moved, they glittered with reflective light.

Though made in the famous French enamel production center in Limoges, Glencairn’s reliquary was created in relation to a specific ritual activity that took place in Canterbury in 1220—the movement of Thomas Becket’s body to an elaborate new shrine. This translation (the term used to refer to such ceremonies) occasioned the dissemination of small portions of the saint’s body to other holy sites, and the enameling workshops in Limoges produced a series of chasses to contain them. The brutal martyrdom of the saint by knights of English King Henry II appears in the lower scene on the front side of the box, where one of the soldiers lunges forward to sever the saint’s head, while his companion flees the scene. Their threatening gestures are mirrored behind the saint, where the hand of God appears from a cloud to signal the sanctity of this brutal attack. The scene on the sloping roof above the martyrdom seems to make a direct reference to the translation of the saint’s body at Canterbury. On the sides are two other saints—the one holding the keys is the apostle Peter.” (Michael Cothren, exhibition label text, “Sacred Stories: Scripture, Myth, and Ritual.”)

Sources:
- Michael Cothren, exhibition label text, “Sacred Stories: Scripture, Myth, and Ritual” (2012).